Bahá’í World/Volume 20/Salim Nounou
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SALIM NOUNOU
1907—1990
In Memorials Of the Faithful, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá distinguishes those who have lived as lovers of the Cause by the stature of their faith. Their spirits soar like cypress trees. Their souls expand in seas of exaltation. They scintillate like stars. They bloom in the heart of the hundred—petalled rose. And having thus conjured them from the Concourse, He then lays their lives to rest with the gentlest of benedictions. He seats them at the banquet—table of their Lord. He gives them to drink of “the wine that has been tempered at the camphor fountain”. He blesses them with the sweetest of sleeps after their tireless services. But even when a cypress sleeps it still stands sentinal.
Salim Nounou had a cypress tree in his soul. It was rooted in humility, soaring towards the infinite, and always with that delicate bending of the head that denoted complete submission to the will of his Lord. It was not only his physical build that recalled the cypress—for he was tall and slim and always elegantwbut he also seemed to bend over the souls around him in a manner both unassuming and protective. With him, one
felt the presence of a spiritual aristocrat. In his later years, when he was frail, this nobility acquired such a transparent quality that one could discern through it the essential purity of a child which the worldly wisdom of the man might have belied.
Salim Nounou was the eldest son of a well-to-do Jewish family in Baghdad. His father was a successful merchant and his mother was refined and well edueated, and to these gifts of business acumen and culture, he himself added the quality of passionate commitment to a cause. He was born sometime in December 1907, during the period of Hanukkah, but after he became a Bahá’í on 8 March 20 years later, he adopted that day for his birthdate. It was typical of him to call this fudging of official records “cheating” by his own admission, for he was a man completely honest and scrupulous in all his dealings. And yet it was also characteristic that he should have done so, for his life as a Bahá’í was his only life, and he attributed all his material successes to his spiritual commitment to the Faith.
He was just 18 years old when he first heard of the Teachings from Daoud Toeg, a Bahá’í of Jewish background who was one of the pillars of the community in Baghdad and Who had business dealings with his father. Mr. Toeg, Mr. Iflaq Banani, and Mr. Ezra Soffer, who were at least 30 years older than the impressionable Salim, first attracted his attention by the fact that they were altogether different from the other clients and business partners who came to his father’s offices. Through their enthusiastic discussions they befriended and then gradually convinced the young man that “the Bahá’í religion was the real thing” and that he had to study its teachings seriously. Although he initially kept his convictions private in order to protect his family from scandal in the Jewish community of Baghdad, he began to frequent Bahá’í meetings, make friends among Bahá’ís of Muslim and Christian backgrounds, and in 1928 started to work on the art of becoming a Bahá’í himself.
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Salim Nounou
The art of becoming a Bahá’í, according to Shoghi Effendi, requires transcending one’s cultural and religious background. In the late 19203 and early 19303 the Bahá’ís in Baghdad and Ṭihrán were Jewish Bahá’ís, Christian Bahá’ís and Muslim Bahá’ís, according to Mr. Nounou. They brought all their prejudices with them into the Bahá’í community. To be a Bahá’í first, and an ‘Iraqi Jew or a Persian Muslim second, in such a context, was not easy. In the early years after his acceptance of the Faith, until his first pilgrimage in 1937, Salim Nounou served his apprenticeship in that art.
He first transcended culture and language when he began to travel between the two capitals ,of ‘lraq and Persia, and sensed the freedom which this gave when he served as a translator for Western Bahá’í Visitors sent by Shoghi Effendi. One of these was the great teacher Martha Root who came to Baghdad in the winter of 1929, and another was Keith Ransom-Kehler, whom he met in Tihran in 1932. But the great influences on his spiritual life, after the patriarchs of the Bahá’í community in Baghdad already
THE BAHA’l WORLD
mentioned, were Persian men such as Mr. D__hikru’llah K_hadim, Mr. Ni‘matu’llah Khan ‘Ala’i, Mr. Abu’l—Qasim Faycli, and others.
Salim acquired Persian citizenship and lived in that country between 1932, when he started a business with an Armenian partner, and 1964, when he moved to France, which became his second home. Although he kept all his connections in the Jewish community, both through his marriage and his successful business, and was well respected, he also maintained a passionate love for the Arabs, their religious fervour and their language. During his last years he served as the liaison between the Universal House of Justice and the Arabian Bahá’ís who corresponded with Haifa through his telex in Nice. By the time he retired, as a widower in England, he had truly mastered the art of transcendence without the loss of his culture. A Jew from Baghdad who spoke fluent Persian as well as Arabic and who was as much at ease in France as he was in England, Salim Nounou was first and foremost a Bahá’í. Nothing less could have contained his soaring aspirations or his love for Shoghi Effendi.
That love was first imprinted on his heart on a silent winter’s day in Palestine when he entered the courtyard of the home of Shoghi Effendi in Haifa and stepped, as he himself put it, into “another world”. It was 11 o’clock in the morning, in December 1937, and he was 30 years old. The sky was blue and the trees rippled in the pale sunlight. Time seemed to hold still in this place, and when he heard the step and saw the youthful face of the beloved Guardian he found himself curiously affected. The question of obedience dominated his pilgrimage: obedience to parental consent for Bahá’í marriage, obedience to the laws of Baha’u’llah, and most significantly, obedience to the Covenant.
When the 19 days of his pilgrimage were overmdays of complete solitude, (for he was the only Eastem pilgrim to have the privilege at this time), punctuated by a tumultuous Visit to Cairo during which all
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the issues of obedience were tested——Salim, a transformed man, returned to Baghdad, to the home of his father. In his own words, “I was like a piece of clay in the hands of the beloved Guardian, and he moulded and imprinted on me the intense love and desire to behave as a Bahá’í.” Although he had a second pilgrimage, the time he met Shoghi Effendi in 1940 was a completely different experience for he was not alone: he was in the company of many others from Persia. It was an opportunity for that initial seal of love to sink even deeper in his soul, but the imprint was unchanged.
From this point on, Salim Nounou’s life throbbed with this love for Shoghi Effendi and this desire to be obedient to his instructions. The trip he took throughout Persia in 1939, sharing his pilgrimage with the friends, and the subsequent trip he took in 1950, when, with the Guardian’s approval, he Visited the Bahá’ís all over Europe in the company of his wife who was not a Bahá’í, were characterized by this intensity and this desire.
Years of service on the National Spiritual Assemblies of both Persia and France were also stamped by this fervor and passionate commitment. It is typical of Salim’s exquisite fair-mindedness that in his brief memoirs written for his children, he asks Baha’u’llah’s forgiveness for the very intensity of his commitment, which he admits was not always wise in relation to his Jewish family. He deplores the fact that his imperfections may have been an impediment to his dear wife’s willingness to accept the truth of Baha’u’llah’s Revelation, but finally concludes:
When one is a perfectionist, he may lose a lot of chances While the other person, who lets things go and gives full vent to his feelings, may do a lot more errors, but perhaps he may do something good at the same time which will recompense all the errors he has made. I wonder if I was that much of a perfectionist, would I have ever become a Bahá’í?
There was one particular service which Salim Nounou rendered the Faith, however, among many others, which might be characterized as having been perfectly filled by him. It was his service as Deputy Trustee of Ḥuqúqu’lláh. He received his training from Mr. Valiyu’llah Varqa himself, whom he assisted from time to time, and with whom he developed a deep and abiding friendship, but it was a service for which his whole life seemed to have been a preparation. Both temperament and culture had given him a marvellous sense of what he called values——a sense of the true worth of things that combined several dimensions of the word. And years of business experience had sharpened his judgment to such a degree that he seemed to see; past the literal transaction to its spiritual worth. He could feel the weight of people. The intensity of his devotion combined with a generosity of spirit to produce a servant of the beloved Guardian and later of the Universal House of Justice so true and so trusted, that according to the words of the cable sent at his passing on 20 June 1990:
...THE SPIRIT OF TOTAL DEDICATION, DEEP HUMILITY AND UNSHAKABLE LOYALTY WHICH HE EVlNCED, WILL ALWAYS BE REMEMBERED.